Reducing Internet Explorer Clutter

Is Internet Explorer (IE) window running out of room to display web page content? Are you getting more and more crowded by the odd looking bars that are appearing at the top of the page? This little handy guide to toolbars will help you to change all that.

Toolbars can either be a big help or a huge hindrance. The bar that has the Back, Forward and Stop button in it is very useful indeed. Everyone needs these buttons. The address bar is an absolute necessity allowing you to type in a website address and go directly to the webpage instead of having to scroll through search results all the time. The Links bar is not something that everyone uses but some find it quite handy. The rest of the toolbars that show up there are usually downloads from websites or Internet Explorer plugins that you can install.

Warning: be very careful about the toolbars that you install into Windows. Many of these toolbars include spyware and can really slow down your computer and can even make a mess of things.

Toolbars can be moved around at the top of the page, turned off, or even edited to remove certain buttons. To move a toolbar, you'll first need to make sure that the toolbars are not locked. You can check this by going to View > Toolbars and seeing if "Lock the toolbars" is checked. If it is, uncheck it. You'll now notice that at the front of every toolbar is a small vertical bar. In XP this bar looks like a vertical row of dots. If you move the mouse over this bar, you'll notice the mouse pointer changes to a horizontal bar with arrows on each end. When it's in that mode, you can click and hold the mouse button down. While the mouse button is down, you can move the toolbar around. Move the mouse slowly around the upper area. You will see a ghost outline (or the toolbar will move itself depending on your display settings) of the where the toolbar will move to when you release the mouse button.

If you want to turn off a toolbar completely, you can go to View > Toolbars and uncheck the one that you don't want anymore.

Modifying a toolbar is one of the things that can really speed up how you use Internet Explorer. Modifying a toolbar will let you add, remove, or move the position of buttons on the toolbar. I find this very useful as there are certain functions that I do with IE that there are no normal buttons for. For example: I prefer to do a print preview before I print a web page. I like to see what's going to be printed before I start using up ink. The preview also lets me print only the page I want, rather than printing the whole document. In order to make this easier, I've added a Print Preview button to the toolbar right next to the print button.

To customize the toolbar you need to need to go to View > Toolbars > Customize. In here you will see a dialog box that allows you to play around with the buttons. The right hand side window is the toolbar the way that it is right now. The left hand side contains all the other buttons you can add to the toolbar. If you click on "Print Preview" on the left, you can now add it to the toolbar by clicking the "Add" button in the middle. Look where it appears when you click the add button. If you want to change the position of the button you can click and drag it around on the right. The "separator" is a special vertical bar used to separate the groups of buttons. Also, if you look at the bottom of that dialog box, you'll see the Text and Icon options. This affects how the buttons look and if there is text along with the button. Try it for yourself.

If you find that you have a bunch of toolbars you don't want and can't get rid of, you probably have spyware and it will need to be cleaned up. Please call support.com and we'll be able to get rid of that nasty software for you.